April 19, 1998

By ROBERT PINSKY

THE MEADOWLANDS
Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City. By Robert Sullivan. 220 pp. New York: Scribner. $23.

hat does the presumably dead labor leader Jimmy Hoffa have in common with the Roman Emperor Caracalla? Probably quite a lot, come to think of it. In the context of Robert
Sullivan's provocative, audacious book about the New Jersey Meadowlands the two figures illustrate a profound truth about human history: that it is a pageant of burying and digging up, as illustrated by the almost unthinkably exploited,
abused, reviled and physically revised lowlands across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The human imagination, endlessly building and destroying, tirelessly creating myths and garbage, heroic dreams and sewage, happens to have buried much
of its production in the abused yet still beautiful and interesting terrain of the Meadowlands.

In legend and maybe in fact, Hoffa is buried in the Meadowlands, perhaps under the end zone in Giants Stadium, perhaps somewhere under the Pulaski Skyway. And New York's magnificent Penn Station, which was imagined and executed as a columned reproduction
of the Roman Baths of Caracalla -- a historical digging-up -- is also buried somewhere in the same terrain. When the great old terminus was razed in 1965, the granite members of its monumental corpse went into the Meadowlands, along with
an incalculable tonnage of human waste and striving: dumped pig bowels from Secaucus along with oyster shells from the Waldorf, rubbed-out gangsters along with lost travelers, chemical toxins along with the remains of the area's onetime
flower nurseries, cedar forests and elegant resorts.

Sullivan's account of the Meadowlands is anecdotal and genial, but his book, covertly ambitious, takes up serious matters. By looking observantly, without trite moralizing, at the natural world as well as at the disposable world we build, and at
the great overlap between the two, this book suggests a challenging new model for how we ought to pay attention. Stringent beyond nostalgia for the impossibly pristine, and clear-sighted beyond disgust for the actual present, Sullivan,
a young freelance journalist, suggests a new quality of attention to intricate systems of reality, both organic and artificial, in their interactions. His opening scene symbolically represents this freshness of approach: Sullivan is on
a bus that has left the Lincoln Tunnel for Secaucus, and he describes the landscape, natural and unnatural, sometimes in language that plays with the difference between the two (''a grove of outlet stores''). He notes
that in some of the airplanes he can see taking off from Newark Airport, ''people have packed their trunks or their backpacks or their carry-on luggage with travel books or maybe brand-new water-repellent hiking clothes or Power
Bars and polypropylene underwear, and they are heading west to travel and explore. But I am creeping slowly back into the East, back to America's first West -- making the reverse commute to the already explored land that has become,
through negligence, through exploitation and through its own chaotic persistence, explorable again.'' Around the ridge of Snake Hill, in a terrain where both his canoe and wildlife move through tainted, odd-colored waters, Sullivan
listens to how the wind in the reeds, blending with the distant, steady rush of the New Jersey Turnpike, produces a sound that, unlike that of migrating whales, ''is not available on cassette or CD.'' Part of the point
is to note the beauty that survives and even inheres in industrial processes, as in the sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins that Sullivan takes for one of his epigraphs. Hopkins finds the grandeur of God even in ''shook foil,''
in ''the ooze of oil / Crushed,'' and perhaps an image of the Holy Ghost brooding at the ''brown brink eastward'' of a smoke-bruised sky.

In no way, however, is ''The Meadowlands'' an apologist work. While decidedly not condoning or neglecting the poisoning of nature, Sullivan matter-of-factly notes our toxic handiwork and starts from there, with a kind of assumption
that the deploring can be taken for granted. His approach somewhat resembles the alert, unsentimental attention of the New Jerseyan John McPhee. This cool tone, despite an occasional lapse into the merely breezy, proves rich and engaging.
McPhee's book ''The Pine Barrens'' is a classic work about a vulnerable, unspoiled wilderness tucked between areas of megalopolis farther south in New Jersey; Sullivan's work is like an ''Inferno''
to that book's ''Paradiso.''

There is a place in the Meadowlands called Walden Swamp, a difficult-to-reach spot that demonstrates how an area can be polluted yet unexplored. Sullivan's canoe trip to Walden Swamp is arduous. Describing the place, he deploys in especially concentrated
form the verbal pattern whereby he describes the detritus of civilization with a vocabulary we associate with ''naturalist'' writing; correspondingly, he applies an industrial vocabulary to wildlife. Thus, near an egret
with feathers ''the color of Styrofoam'' he notes ''waterlogged cigarette butts . . . bloated and curled as if impersonating shrimp.'' Similarly, he notes ''a small school of plastic soda
bottles'' and mentions ''the migratory patterns of the cars.'' Despite the ''sewery smell'' of the swamp, it is full of muskrats and wildfowl, and the splashes of spawning carp: ''Thrashing
around in the foul-smelling muck, the carp, each approximately two feet long, did not seem at all out of place beneath the New Jersey Turnpike; the scales on their backs were gross and coarse in the pattern of worn-down radial tires.''
This self-conscious little stylistic gesture is more than a trick, because it points us toward reality. Living creatures survive in this environment, and the exact habits and adaptations and ills of the egrets, herons, muskrats, carp,
catfish, turtles, mosquitoes, phragmites and spartina there deserve close attention precisely because, like it or not, they are part of a matrix that includes our Pepsi bottles, cigarette filters, antifreeze and paradichlorobenzene.

The implication is that someone who takes an airplane from Newark to Colorado or Montana, hoping to reproduce the experience of Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, is not doing as Thoreau and Muir did: the restorative venture from ordinary life into the
truly unexplored wilderness, Sullivan implies, may require a paradoxical direction. At the end of the 20th century, the unexplored secrets of nature may reside, at least partly, in the ways that nature has dealt with our worst depredations.

In this regard, Sullivan is like a poet who declines to rewrite the landscape of Wordsworth or the city of Baudelaire. Though his taste is not always at the McPhee level, the freshness of viewpoint carries him through. His sometimes inspired language
of disgust, as when he speaks of canoeing through the ''foul borscht'' above a reef of garbage, has a morally steady comedy to it. But a mere series of smell jokes and Secaucus gags would be inadequate to the truth.
For one thing, some aspects of the Meadowlands, though this may not be saying much, are getting better. ''And for all this, nature is never spent,'' says Hopkins in the epigraph poem, ''There lives the dearest
freshness deep down things.'' Some of the nightmare images of this book might seem to contradict that affirmation: the half-gassed dogs left by an irresponsible animal control officer to revive and stumble over the garbage mountain,
for instance, or the underground leachate fires that belched foul smoke, unextinguished, for years. But on reclaimed land, on an attractive grassy slope or a boat sailing a cleaned-up stretch of the Hackensack River, it is possible to
whisper, with a woman Sullivan quotes, ''This is beautiful down here, and nobody knows.''

Such glimpses of hope depend partly on issues in the debate Sullivan recounts between two knowledgeable defenders of the region, one working for the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission, which creates new kinds of terrain, and the other a fisherman
who operates boat tours in the region. The fisherman, suspicious of the H.M.D.C.'s projects, advocates keeping our tampering hands away from a natural healing process, a view perhaps echoed in Sullivan's description of ''a
landscape of industry retired or retooled, of nature tested and returning in its own scrambled order.'' This debate seems difficult and important, its focus an enigmatic area where the grebe and heron inhabit a land of former
cyanide pools and rusting truck bodies. No one has the wisdom to find the right way through this literal and figurative swamp; it is, in a word, unexplored. Its mystery is caught in Sullivan's peroration, in which he again echoes
Hopkins. ''Oh Meadowlands,'' he begins in a half-comic apostrophe, and asks, ''How is it that you will still somehow manage to be spoiled but unspoiled, trod upon and bulldozed, remediated and reclaimed, dumped
in and sprayed all over but somehow never spent?'' Though it would be unforgivable to repose in this unspent quality, taking redemption for granted, it would also be a mistake to neglect the unspent in search only of that theoretical,
in a way mushy, ideal, the unspoiled.

Robert Pinsky, the Poet Laureate of the United States, was born and raised in Long Branch, N.J.